Plant one million edible chestnuts!

In the future I see, we will find ourselves with moving & still water everywhere. Rather than hiding water or helping it to move away as quick as possible, we hold it high & prominent in our landscape. Every home connected to water. Catching it and storing it in ponds, using swales, planning better roads...

There are many communities that already are built with this understanding, always the targets of imposed imperial artifice that we call home. It’s sits on top the landscape A machine that turns ecology into its component parts atomizing all of us. Cages sold as homes and towns.

What would we be if our common goal was the improvement of water from the back door outward- the raising of soil, the expansion of the foundations of life?

There is a real deficit in our culture's knowledge of overall landscape processes. I'm working hard to make sure that people get at least an exposure to the ways that different scales of process interact with each other.

One way this manifests is my first piece of advice in looking at an area of land -  "walk down to the creek/river and get a sense of it's form." Oftentimes, I hear: "there is no river or creek" and this shows that they think the land ends at the property boundary. Everywhere is a watershed.

Uplands landscapes are shaped by water processes, and understanding the creek will help you understand what's going on upland. It's also a good idea to get a sense of the ridges- the roof of the watershed. Then walk over to the tops of the valleys.

Find the floodplains, which are supposed to be the areas that rivers flood, in order to release energy and drop sediment. A healthy river pours into a floodplain every couple years. Vegetation in the floodplain should support helping the water spread and soak.

If the river is incised- not allowed to leave it's channel- there is energy not being released during big events, and it will be expressed somehow: probably bad flooding elsewhere, but also further incision and the dropping of the river channel, which takes ground water with it.

A hungry river begins to meander or tear at it's sides, because it has to do something with all the extra energy. Rather than helping build soil like in a healthy flood event, it takes it away.

A blanket peat bog on Kinder Scout, Derbyshire. Credit: Martyn Williams / Alamy

I’ve always had a soft spot for bogs. Some of the happiest days of my childhood were spent exploring the Gower Peninsula’s mires and marshes. They gave me my first intimations of the fittedness, the supreme specialisation and intricate inter-relationships of ecosystems — their denizens the sundews and orchids were my earliest lessons in the marvels of adaptation. Their sphagnum substrate was no less of a wonder.

‘Blanket bog’ this habitat is called, although its wobble put me more in mind of the waterbed owned by a friend’s racy parents. On a visit to the Swansea Museum, I learnt that, yes, the moss was not merely a covering, but the landscape’s very body; that, down the ages, the same strands of sphagnum had grown at one end and decayed at the other to form a deep seam of peat.

We speak reverently of ‘ancient woodlands’, meaning that the trees date from 1600 or earlier, but bogs are millennia in the making. Unlike trees, they don’t proclaim their growth and age. On the surface, they appear to be time stood still. The peat beneath, however, is the chronicle of aeons.

Imagine, then, my disquiet a few years later, in the 1970s, as peat was mass-marketed by the cut-price jumbo bale as the mainstay, purported panacea and mindless addiction of almost every facet of commercial and domestic horticulture.

It’s easy to keep hold of what hasn’t stirred, easy to plan what hasn’t occurred. It’s easy to shatter delicate things, easy to scatter little things. Do things before they happen. Get them straight before they get mixed up.

The tree you can’t reach your arms around grew from a tiny seedling. The nine-story tower rises from a heap of clay. The ten-thousand-mile journey begins beneath your foot.

Do, and do wrong; Hold on, and lose. Not doing, the wise soul doesn’t do it wrong, and not holding on, doesn’t lose it. (In all their undertakings, it’s just as they’re almost finished that people go wrong. Mind the end as the beginning, then it won’t go wrong.)

That’s why the wise want not to want, care nothing for hard-won treasures, learn not to be learned, turn back to what people overlooked. They go along with things as they are, but don’t presume to act.

How To Add a Frog Pond to Your Landscape

As we prepare our gardens for the warm months ahead in the Northern Hemisphere, we revisit an essay where Jay Griffiths brings our attention to what dwells in that rich soil beneath our feet.

This is a good read. we have a moral responsibility to point out that if civilizations fall by using up their soil, then they sustain themselves by prioritizing their soil.

CHRISTINA LARSON, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ecologist Rolf Peterson remembers driving remote stretches of road in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and seeing areas strewn with deer carcasses. But that changed after gray wolves arrived in the region from Canada and Minnesota.

“When wolves moved in during the 1990s and 2000s, the deer-vehicle collisions went way down,” said the Michigan Tech researcher.

Recently, another team of scientists has gathered data about road collisions and wolf movements in Wisconsin to quantify how the arrival wolves there affected the frequency of deer-auto collisions. They found it created what scientists call “a landscape of fear."

“In a pretty short period of time, once wolves colonize a county, deer vehicle collisions go down about 24%,” said Dominic Parker, a natural resources economist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and co-author of their new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Both thinning of the deer population by wolves and behavior changes in fearful deer are factors in the drop-off, Parker said.

“When you have a major predator around, it impacts how the prey behave,” he said. “Wolves use linear features of a landscape as travel corridors, like roads, pipelines and stream beds. Deer learn this and can adapt by staying away.”

In the book Another Kind of Garden, the methods of Jean Pain are revealed.

He spent his entire short-lived life studying brush land and forest protection, specifically fire prevention, alongside his wife Ida. These studies led to an enormous amount of practical knowledge for composting, heating water, as well as harvesting methane, all of which are by-products of maintaining a forest or brush land with fire prevention techniques. While this knowledge is applicable in many instances, it is worth remembering that the root of all of this knowledge lies in forest preservation.

It's time to take soil seriously. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states with very high confidence in its latest report, land degradation represents "one of the biggest and most urgent challenges" that humanity faces.                                                                                          

The report assesses potential impacts of climate change on food production and concludes that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will reduce crop yields and degrade the nutritional quality of food.  

To avert climate catastrophe, the report warns, people need to make changes in agriculture and land use. In other words, it's no longer enough to wean society off of fossil fuels. Stabilizing the climate will also require removing carbon from the sky. Rethinking humanity's relationship to the soil can help on both scores...

Gillian's book 'From Sting to Spin', a History of Nettle Fibre, brings together evidence how nettle fibre was used in many countries around the world from the earliest times up until the Second World War.

Hello! Day 2 of #PermPrin the June of Permaculture Principles. The principles intersect so just starting with one:

Observation "Use protracted and thoughtful observation of natural systems rather then protracted and thoughtless labor"

This principle might be obvious, but people are always diving too quickly into naming problems or offering solutions. Just asking "what is occurring?" and spending time to see many kinds of patterns, is huge.

When you walk in the forest,  the animals are aware of your presence; you create ripples of rings of effects out from your actions. The birds are noticing &changing their songs & position and the other animals notice. You are not seeing the woods: you are seeing your own impact

This is true in science, in community organizing, in looking for your car keys- you are living within the sphere of your own interference.

Mollison recommends the following:

"A child-like & non-selective approach" asking "I wonder why?”... & being curious

"A thematic approach" breaking things down into Water, Land, Birds, Paths, etc. ...

"An instrumental approach" using measurements, equipment, data collection

"An experiential approach" using all the senses. I recommend looking for patterns, for what calls you, for what you are avoiding seeing, for why patterns break or change

A post on coppices and pollards and how they can turn trees into powerful carbon-pumps.

#ClimateHope: Walking around old managed landscapes, you might come across trees like these–many thin trunks coming out of little stumps, or tall trees with knobby tops with a lot of small branchings popping up. These are #coppices & #pollards– they are VERY interesting. 1/?

See 4 images here

They meet many needs: they grow a lot of thin poles of wood for many uses, build huge roots masses, can fit between other trees, take advantage of the fast early growth of some hardwood trees, and can sequester carbon quickly.

One can go all over the world & see this kind of relationship between people & their re-growing trees; people have done this everywhere. it’s a kind of relationship to the earth that is symbiotic & worth reconnecting with.

The concept is simple, many trees all over the world don't live very long once they get big, but when they are browsed by animals, they stay young & can live for a long time. When we coppice or pollard, we cut trees back on a regular schedule. pic from  http://midwestpermaculture.com/2012/11/coppicingpollarding/